Gary Kim was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes, ranked second in the world for coverage of the mobile business, and as a "top 10" telecom analyst. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top two percent.
As I was sitting in church recently, I wondered why the worship music I was hearing did not strike me as powerfully as some of the contemporary Christian worship music from the 1995 to 2015 period or thereabouts.
Some might point to such examples such as::
Hillsong (Darlene Zschech's "Shout to the Lord," 1993, then the broader Hillsong output through the 2000s)
Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, David Crowder — the "worship pastor as recording artist" era
Michael W. Smith, Paul Baloche, Tim Hughes
These songs, from that era, crossed denominational lines, being sung in Catholic parishes, black Baptist churches, and Anglican cathedrals alongside evangelical megachurches.
More recently, I admit I hear few newer compositions that seem to have that same resonance, and just wondered whether bursts of musical creation have happened before.
Maybe the creative cycles are inevitable, though. You might note that some of your favorite musical groups or singers in general also are not equally commercially successful throughout their careers.
Some might argue the history of music is actually full of concentrated creative bursts followed by relative fallow periods:
The Viennese Classical Period (~1770–1800) Haydn, Mozart, and the early Beethoven produced a staggering concentration of the foundational classical repertoire in roughly 30 years. The generation immediately after struggled to define itself in that shadow.
The Florentine Camerata and Early Opera (1590s–1640s) The invention of opera produced a creative explosion — Monteverdi, Peri, Caccini. Then a relative consolidation period before the Baroque opera seria fully matured.
Tin Pan Alley's Golden Era (~1920s–1950s) Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Berlin, Arlen — a concentrated burst of the "Great American Songbook." The late 1950s saw it run dry just before rock replaced it entirely.
The British Invasion / Classic Rock Peak (~1965–1975) An almost absurdly dense decade of canonical output. By the late 1970s, critics were already writing "rock is dead" pieces.
Bebop and Hard Bop Jazz (~1945–1965) Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Parker — followed by fusion, which many felt diluted rather than advanced the tradition.
Scholars of creativity point to a common structure:
A new platform or technology opens up (the printing press for Luther, the concert hall for Vienna, recording for Tin Pan Alley, the megachurch and Christian radio for the worship era)
A small, networked community of talented people cross-pollinate intensely
There's a genuine felt need the music meets — social, spiritual, political
Then institutionalization sets in, the pioneers age or scatter, and the field fills with imitators.
The worship music burst fits this template almost perfectly, some might argue.
“Paradoxically, it was the success of Christian music that led to its failure,” says Derek Walker, writing for Christianity Today. “The industrialisation that managed people’s demands for Christian music ended up being the cause of its own demise.”
In the 90s, sales of Christian music albums exceeded those of classical, jazz and new age music. Supply could not keep up with demand. Record companies had to keep signing bands, just to keep the machinery of business going, feeding the playlists of Christian radio stations in the USA with new material.
Lower quality was the result, he argues. The market was saturated with undistinguished material. Streaming might have fragmented the audience, while formats became clichéd, he says.
That might be less directly true for liturgical music, rather than contemporary Christian music. But I still do not hear new compositions of great power.
Gary Kim was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes, ranked second in the world for coverage of the mobile business, and as a "top 10" telecom analyst. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top two percent.
It’s normal for commentators to note that any new tax plan “gives” more to the wealthy than to working people. So it is with the latest tax plan.
Such claims normally rely on absolute dollar amounts of benefit, rather than the impact of rates, which normally are progressive, with higher rates for wealthier payers, and lower rates for lower-income earners.
Most such differences are the result of mathematics. A small percent of a big number is a big number; a small percent of a small number is still a small number.
In the United States, for example, the top 10 percent of filers pay roughly three-quarters of all federal income taxes.
The bottom half of filers produce 10 percent to 15 percent of all federal income tax receipts, and some effectively pay zero rates when one adds in the effect of income transfers and credits.
If you broaden from income taxes to total federal taxes, including payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare), the overall system remains progressive, if less so than looking strictly at income taxes.
But the point is that any tax plan that reduces rates will “give much more to the rich” than to lower-income taxpayers, simply because “the rich” pay most of the taxes. Even a progressive rate reduction is not going to change that.
Gary Kim was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes, ranked second in the world for coverage of the mobile business, and as a "top 10" telecom analyst. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top two percent.
Allbirds, the shoe company, has sold its shoe business to American Exchange Group and wants to pivot to supplying high-performance computing to firms that are not comfortable or able to work with hyperscale suppliers.
We might wish the firm luck with its pivot. On the other hand, it might be the clearest sign of excess in the artificial intelligence market. That isn’t to say there is froth everywhere. But there might be some similarities to Pets.com, perhaps a poster child for investor exuberance during the dot.com bubble.
Both companies built their identities around a specific consumer promise, but were unable to reach profitability.
Pets.com sold dog food below cost and lost money on nearly every order once shipping was factored in.
Allbirds similarly struggled with margins.
Pets.com simply ran out of cash. Allbirds was able to sell its core business.
The pivot is the issue.
Pets.com had no logistical or supply chain advantage over existing pet retailers. As did many other firms, it simply appended the “.com” suffix to its name. Allbirds seems to be doing the same using “AI.”
Allbirds has no obvious AI infrastructure expertise, proprietary technology, or data moat. The pivot is a financial and PR maneuver, not a strategy grounded in capabilities.
Can a footwear company successfully manage the technical and cooling requirements of a tier-four data center? One might argue they can buy graphics processing units and hire personnel who do such things now.
Pets.com proved that brand awareness doesn't solve logistics. NewBird AI now has to prove that it can surmount the "compute" expertise gap in a market segment with lots of other competitors, such as bitcoin miners similarly pivoting to high-performance computing “as a service.”
Gary Kim was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes, ranked second in the world for coverage of the mobile business, and as a "top 10" telecom analyst. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top two percent.
For sports viewing and revenues, as with any other product, supply and demand do matter.
Huge demand will tend to find a supply, no matter how much the government tries to do about it, while falling demand will lead to changes in supply. And that might already be happening.
So it likely will be with the Federal Communications Commission’s inquiry into sports broadcasting rights.
No matter what regulatory tweaks the FCC might pursue in its ongoing sports broadcasting inquiry, live sports rights will remain extraordinarily valuable, at least in the short term.
But long term might be quite another story. Regional sports networks already are feeling the strain as a combination of cord cutting and a shift to streaming are threatening the market.
And global sports rights, though growing, are expected to slow.
A few categories seem better protected, though. Between 2014 and 2024, the top 10 sports properties increased their global media rights value 113 percent, from roughly $15 billion to $32 billion, while the rights of the next 20 properties grew from about $5 billion to $7 billion, or about 40 percent.
High-demand content (NFL, the Olympics, Super Bowl, FIFA World Cup, March Madness finals) might retain a premium. Other content might see less demand and value.
The problem is the long term. Short form social media increasingly seems favored by younger viewers, displacing viewership of “full games.”
Generation Z (roughly ages 10 to 28) is less likely to watch live games in full, and far more likely to consume sports through short, on-demand snippets.
A recent global survey found that just 31 percent of sports fans aged 18 to 24 watched live full-length matches, compared to 75 percent of fans aged 55 or older:
attention span is shorter (or consumers are accustomed to jumping between content bits)
digital platforms are preferred (on demand)
Personalization (one-size-fits-all does not resonate with a generation raised on algorithmically personalized content feeds)
Interactivity and viewing on mobile devices
Cultural relevance (Gen Z often enjoys creator-driven content that is more irreverent, fast-paced or tailored to internet culture).
Whether the FCC has much leeway to change matters is debatable. Even if the problem is fragmentation of the viewing experience, as well as higher costs, so long as demand exists, costs will climb.
U.S. football fans wanting to watch every National Football League game must currently spend between $935 and $1,500 annually for full NFL access across 10 services, for example.
That speaks to the demand. And that means distributors will continue to drive up the underlying costs of such premium content that ultimately get passed along to consumers, at least in the short term.
The FCC’s inquiry) is narrowly focused on fragmentation, consumer access to free over-the-air broadcasts, and whether current rights deals hinder local stations’ public-interest obligations.
It does not grant the agency authority to cap rights fees, rewrite league contracts, or dictate how much distributors (broadcast, cable, or streaming) are willing to pay.
The FCC cannot “fix this” because sports rights are determined in a competitive open market where leagues auction scarce live inventory to the highest bidders.
Live professional and major college sports have structural advantages that set them apart from almost any other programming:
scarcity and live appeal that make them one of the last reliable “water-cooler” events in a fragmented media landscape
premium demographics (affluent, hard-to-reach male viewers)
monopoly-like supply (leagues control their own content and can sell rights collectively.
Much public policy chatter is about theater and perception, so we should not be surprised when government officials say they want to “do something” about a problem.
But there is a “problem” sports team owners do face.
Every time a league sells a new exclusive window to a new platform, two things happen:
total rights revenue goes up
the number of fans who can actually watch goes down.
Up to this point, that tradeoff was tolerable because the revenue gains far outweighed the audience losses. But a problem remains: advertising revenues are built on audiences.
So, eventually, subscription and rights revenue gains are possibly balanced by losses of advertising revenue as audiences fragment.
If the assumption is that fans would follow the product wherever it went, paying whatever they had to, that theory now begins to be tested. FCC rules will not affect that new test of supply and demand.
Rights fees are not absorbed by networks; they are recovered through the consumer’s wallet in one form or another:
streaming and cable bundles
broadcast networks (advertising costs are passed along to consumers in product prices)
subscriptions or ad costs are still paid for by consumers.
The problem perhaps is not “older viewers” for whom watching their favorite team play is not discretionary. It is the younger viewers who never developed the habit who are the problem.
At what point might disinterest finally begin to prick the balloon of rights payments? If younger viewers are not interested in watching live sports, what happens to the business model?
Gary Kim was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes, ranked second in the world for coverage of the mobile business, and as a "top 10" telecom analyst. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top two percent.
What do geeks at Colorado School of Mines do for fun on an April weekend? Build boats out of cardboard and duct tape. Will they float? Will...
